Watergate Was a Minor Crime
Deeper Than Palast on the Deep Throat Revelationby Paul Street
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 7, 2005

On
at least four occasions (twice on television and twice on the radio)
during the last week, I’ve had to endure listening to dominant media
outlets host debates on whether or not Mark Felt was “a hero” for feeding
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward with information on the
notorious Watergate break-in of June 1972, when four spies working for the
Richard Nixon re-election campaign were caught burglarizing the Democratic
Party’s headquarters.

These
debates seemed to suggest that Felt is a hero of “the left,” assigning
Republicans the role of denying Felt’s goodness.

Felt,
a hero? God, no…at least not from this (mine) left perspective, at least.
For one thing, the “hero” designation accepts the wrongheaded notion that
the Watergate revelations were “heroic” in the first place.

They
weren’t. The amateurish Watergate operation, as Noam Chomsky and Edward S.
Herman pointed out in 1988, was a relatively small sin compared to other
crimes more professionally committed by the Nixon administration. Those
other transgressions included the “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which
killed possibly 200,000 people and terribly damaged a poor peasant nation,
and the undertaking of a massive FBI operation to undermine basic
democratic freedoms at home.

The
Nixon administration was involved in the flat out Nazi-style assassination
of a leading Black Panther (Fred Hampton), the sparking of racial
disturbances to discredit the black power movement, numerous murderous
attacks on the American Indian Movement, and numerous acts of
infiltration, burglary, and illegal espionage against radical
organizations like the Weather Underground and the Socialist Workers
Party. See among other documents, Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Hall,
Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther
Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Press, 1988).

In
“comparison to [all] this” [and I didn’t even mention the Nixon
administration’s murderous schemes against the sovereign and
democratically elected Allende government in Chile], Chomsky noted in
1990, “Watergate is a tea party.” (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power,
New Press, 2002, p. 118).

Why
all the attention to the Watergate break-in compared to that “other”
stuff? By Chomsky and Herman’s analysis in
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(Pantheon, 1988), “powerful groups” like the Democratic Party “are capable
of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by [American corporate]
media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are
threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of
democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or distant victims of
U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general
population, media opposition is muted or absent altogether.” (p. 300)

For
Chomsky and Herman, the disparity between the media’s obsession with
Watergate and its relative disinterest in, say, the carpet bombing of
Cambodia or the destruction of domestic opposition groups was a textbook
example of the corporate media’s servility to state power. Truly “heroic”
revelations and media coverage would have attended to the infinitely
greater crimes committed against Cambodia, AIM, Chile, and the Black
Panthers.

I
agree with Greg Palast when he writes the following:

“Every
time I say investigative reporting is dead or barely breathing in the USA,
some little smartass will challenge me, ‘What about Watergate? Huh?’ Hey,
buddy, the Watergate investigation was 32 years ago -- that means it’s
been nearly a third of a century since the Washington Post has
printed a big investigative scoop.”

“The
Post today would never run the Watergate story: a hidden source
versus official denial. Let’s face it, Bob Woodward, now managing editor
at the Post, has gone from ‘All the President’s Men’ to becoming
the President’s Man -- Bush at War. Ugh!”

“And
now the Post is considering further restrictions on the use of
confidential sources --no more ‘Deep Throats.’”

“Despite its supposed new concern for hidden sources, let’s note that
Newsweek and the Post have no trouble providing, even in the
midst of this story, cover for secret Administration sources that are
FAVORABLE to Bush. Editor Whitaker’s retraction relies on ‘Administration
officials’ whose names he kindly withholds.”

Still,
we should go deeper than Palast to the Chomsky and Herman level. It’s not
just that Watergate is more than three decades old and that dominant media
no longer practices the sort of tough investigative journalism that helped
produce the Watergate story. The problem is also that Watergate wasn’t
even close to the worst thing done by the Nixon administration and that
the servile press is still patted on the back for “unseating a government”
with revelations about a clumsy break-in that was conducted with unclear
motives and no apparent direct presidential involvement (Nixon’s
illegalities had to do with his efforts to cover up the subsequent
investigation) against the other leading US business party. The Nixon
administration should have been unseated as a result of revelations about
much worse criminal activity directed at less powerful others at home and
abroad.

The
second reason not to consider Felt a hero is that he was a leading agent
in the broader American repressive state criminality of the Watergate era.
The de facto number two at the FBI for a period (thanks to the frequent
illness of J. Edgar Hoover’s lover Clyde Tolson) in the early 1970s, Felt
was actually a leading architect of the Bureau’s infamous COINTELPRO
operation, the federal government’s domestic spying-and-burglary campaign
against the domestic American antiwar and black and Native American left.
A G-man’s G-man, Felt was convicted in 1980 of authorizing nine illegal
entries in New Jersey in 1972 and 1973.

Felt
was authorizing illegal break-ins during the very same time that he was so
“heroically” opening his “Deep Throat” for Bob Woodward in a Washington DC
parking garage!

And
guess what? “In a strange footnote to history,” the
Washington Post reported
last week, “Richard M. Nixon unwittingly testified on behalf of Deep
Throat in a federal court trial in October 1980 -- six years after Nixon
was forced to resign as president because of his involvement in the
Watergate scandal.” Nixon testified, in other words, in support of Felt,
in the trial that led to Felt’s conviction.

Is
that wild or what?

Felt
must have been happy when Ronald Reagan got elected (possibly with some
help from Republican Party hostage release shenanigans in Iran) in 1980.
Felt got pardoned later that same year by Reagan, who (by the way) would
face a smaller scandal because his administration “was found to have
violated congressional prerogatives during the Iran-contra affair” but NOT
“when it dismissed with contempt the judgment of the International Court
of Justice that the United States was engaged in the ‘unlawful use of
force’ and violation of treaties . . . in its attack against Nicaragua”
(Chomsky and Herman, p. 300). Isn’t history fun?

Then,
finally, there’s the issue of Felt’s motivation, past and present. In
1973, his motive appears to have been retribution for having been passed
over by Nixon for the top FBI job. Heartfelt concern for the fate of the
democratic republic does not appear to have been the driving force,
considering his illegal operations in New Jersey and (no doubt) elsewhere.
Today, the best guess is that his main goal is to get some money out of it
all for his surviving family members before he dies.

Maybe
he is also trying to go down (no pun intended) in history as Deep Throat
instead of the high placed hack who Nixon passed over and Regan pardoned.

Paul Street is
the author of Empire and Inequality:
America and the World Since
9/11 (Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and
Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black
Chicago (Chicago, IL, April 2005). He can be reached at:
pstreet99@sbcglobal.net.